If there's one consistent piece of criticism that gets lobbed in Canonical's and Mark Shuttleworth's direction, it's that they do not contribute enough code - or anything else for that matter - to the Free software world. Mark Shuttleworth has apparently had enough, and has written a very, very lengthy blog post detailing how he feels about this criticism.

What good is your precious code if you've got no one putting it in the hands of users? Does it really matter that the one putting your code out there is not the one contributing the most code?

The problem that many Linux advocates have is the fact that Ubuntu is being praised for only doing the last easy 10% of the work. Where are they actually removing the HAL dependency? where are they actually investing into OpenOffice.org to fix the laundry list of bugs that are over 4 years old in some cases, where are they when it comes to moving GNOME forward by moving the individual projects away from deprecated components? where are their contributions to Xorg that improve reliability, power management, and so on? Where are they improving hardware compatibility? finishing software that seem to be stuck in a perpetual 0.1 state on Linux?

The problem that many Linux advocates have is the show pony attitude of Ubuntu coming into bundling up a whole heap of stuff and then taking no time out to actually show appreciation to those individual projects that actually make their distribution possible - without those projects they would have no distribution.

The problem that many Linux advocates have is the fact that Ubuntu is being praised for only doing the last easy 10% of the work.

The "last easy 10%" of getting the damn thing in the hands of the user?

Given how many distros tried and failed when it came to the "average end-user", I wouldn't say that this is "easy" or "10%". And that's exactly the cultural problem between Linux and "Linux on the desktop".

The main problem for the "show me the code" people is that the integration work this requires isn't as portable across distros as the latest GTK backend rewrite.

One reason why OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, and GIMP (and Blender) are relatively back in the stone age UI wise compared to their proprietary equivalents... What make the others special is that last 10% which is assumed to be the "easy" 10% of the work and not paid enough attention to.

I am not saying that technology wise those projects I listed do not do enough... they are great and I have been using them for years (OpenOffice and Eclipse especially).